Forgotten Sea (7 page)

She scrambled through the canted door, ducking her head to avoid the rough-timbered ceiling. There was a nasty moment going down the steps when she thought about snakes and spiders and things that lived in holes underground. But then the passage opened into a small room, cool and musty, with shelves along one wall and a couple of bunks on the other.

Simon was already lowering Justin’s body onto the bottom bunk. But she had time to notice—just before his head hit the pillow—that it was already dented. His shoes were under the bed.

She sucked in her breath.

Simon turned at the sound.

Their eyes met.

He must have seen her working things out. The bed. The shoes. The heth. The knife. And Justin, sprawled across the threshold to the cellar, half in, half out.

She wet her lips. “He didn’t walk out of the infirmary.”

Not on his own. They’d brought him here, Zayin or Simon.

She saw that now. He must have woken alone, in pain, in the dark. No wonder he’d tried to escape. And she’d dragged him back like a barn cat with a bloody mouse and deposited him at the headmaster’s feet.

“How,” Simon asked softly, “did you discover he was gone?”

Her mind stuttered. She raised her chin, forcing herself to hold his gaze. “I couldn’t sleep.” He would know why, he’d found her, he knew everything about her. “So I decided to check on him.”

“Your sympathy does you credit.” A pause, while they both looked down at the man on the bed. “Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of your judgment.”

Pain squeezed her head. She could not think. She could not breathe. “He shouldn’t have been left by himself.”

Simon’s lips thinned. “Apparently not.”

“I found him,” she said. “I can stay with him. Let me help, we have a connection, I—”

“Your
connection
is your problem. You are too close to this matter to see clearly where your responsibility and your loyalty should lie. Perhaps you need to take some time for reflection.”

“I know you’re disappointed in my performance as Seeker,” she said through stiff lips. “But please, I have the calling. If you give me another chance . . .”

“Seeking is a gift,” Simon said. “Even if I wanted to, I could not deprive you of your vocation.”

She exhaled in relief. “Then—”

“However, I can and will determine your other duties at Rockhaven.”

Her
other
duties?

She worked for him. In his office.

Adult nephilim remained in the community, under the Rule that governed every aspect of their lives, that brought them closer to their un-Fallen perfection, that unified and defined them. The younger ones lived in the dorms as proctors. A few qualified as teachers at the school. Most graduates, however, went to work in the settlement’s glassworks factory. Rockhaven Glass had been in operation for a hundred and thirty years, providing exquisite stained and textured art glass for designers all over the world and a steady income for the nephilim.

Lacking any other skills, Lara had expected to put her business education to work in the distribution center. But Simon had found a place for her in his own office. She’d always liked to imagine that the headmaster took a special interest in her, in her future.

“I can look after him and still do my job.”

“You are mistaken,” Simon said with icy calm. “From now on, you cannot see him, cannot speak to him, cannot visit him, is that clear?”

A direct order this time, Lara thought dully. He was taking no chances on her disobeying him again.

“Until I can trust your judgment, you cannot work for me,”

Simon continued. “Tomorrow morning, report to the raptor house. For the time being, you may assist Keeper Moon.”

Crazy Moon, the mews mistress, who preferred her injured birds to people.

Lara’s hands shook. Her throat constricted. “You’re banishing me to the birdcages?”

“By your own actions, you have endangered the community we are sworn to preserve. You leave me no choice.”

“But I’m wasted in the mews. At least . . .” She floundered for a compromise that would leave her pride intact. “Send me to the glassworks.”

“You are not an artist.”

“No,” Lara admitted. Maybe once she’d dreamed . . . But she wasn’t Gifted like the rest of her kind with an artist’s creativity. She couldn’t sing or play, spin or weave, paint or draw. She had a head for figures and a knack for organization. That was all.

“Your chemistry marks were never high enough to consider you for the lab side,” Simon continued with dispassionate brutality. “You have neither the strength nor the training that might qualify you for the furnace.”

His assessment was no more than she expected. Maybe what she deserved. But she winced, all the same.

“I can still answer phones. Track orders. I’ve got computer skills . . .”

“I think . . . Something quieter. More contemplative,”

Simon said. “The Rule calls us to self-knowledge and obedience. You have proven yourself sadly lacking in both. This is an opportunity for you to reflect on your true place in the community.”

Her true place?
she wondered bitterly.
Reporting to
Misfit
Moon? Cleaning up bird shit?

Her eyes stung. Her heart burned. All the reflection in the world wouldn’t make her see this as an opportunity. This was punishment.

She blinked, her gaze flitting to the bed. The worst part was, she wasn’t the only one suffering for her insubordination. Justin was being punished, too.

The chilled, small room pressed in on them. She and Simon stood face-to-face, toe-to-toe, like fighters, like lovers. She raised her chin again, a gesture of defiance. She had never defied him before. Another first, she thought, trembling with exhaustion and daring. It was a night for them.

“Can I at least say good-bye?”

Simon’s eyes flickered. “He won’t hear you.”

“Then it shouldn’t matter to you. But it does to me.”

His face was cool and impervious as marble. “As you wish.”

A tiny victory. She would make the most of it.

She approached the bunk. Even spell bound and unconscious, Justin looked messy and attractive and vibrantly, painfully alive. She knelt beside his bed like a girl at prayer, hands in front, resting on the rough wool of his blanket.

Awareness traced down her spine like a bead of perspiration. She looked over her shoulder. Simon stood in the center of the room, his eyes gleaming silver in the mage fire.

“Do you mind?” she asked pointedly.

His jaw set. “Not at all ,” he said politely and turned his back.

Taking a deep breath, she leaned over Justin’s pillow and pressed her lips to his. Her hands fumbled in her skirt. Her heart drummed wildly in her chest, in her ears. She held the kiss as long as she dared, willing her breath into him. Her right hand slid from her pocket and thrust under his mattress. He never moved.

She sighed. “All right. I’m ready.”

She pushed to her feet. Simon was waiting. Head bowed, eyes lowered, she walked past him, leaving her small defiance behind.

Along with Justin’s dive knife, a lump under his mattress.

He was shaken. Changed. She had changed him. Lara’s kiss—
soft lips, warm breath, her life, her
strength, in him
—had ripped through him with the force of a tornado, churning him to the depths. He floundered in a sea of memory and desire, at the mercy of his dreams, a plaything of the waves, a prisoner of his own mind.

He wanted . . .

He needed . . .

His world was ended, everything lost, drowned, submerged beneath the waves. He had to find . . .

“Find what?” A man’s voice, deep and penetrating, dragged him back to his body, to his splitting head and the flat, hard cot. “What are you looking for?”

He disliked the voice instinctively. An impression surfaced, too fleeting to be called a memory, of a large hard man wearing black and a sneer. No name.

“Who are you?” the voice asked.

The question pried at his brain like an oyster knife, slipping through his weakened defenses, threatening to rip him open, to plunder the soft gray flesh inside. Pain speared his head. His throat burned. He recoiled in self-defense, retreating deeper, down, down, through levels of pain.

But the voice pursued him. “Where are you from?”

The sea.

All his memories began with the sea, warm and sunlit, gray and storm cast, the clear cold salt dark.

A sense of loss swept over him, leaving him parched and alone with his pain. Too much pain. He couldn’t find his way through it, he could not think, he could not
remember
. . .

Why couldn’t he remember?

God, he was thirsty.

“Would you like some water?” A woman.

For a moment his heart leaped, buoyed by her memory.

Her arm around his shoulders. Her breath, mingling with
his. Her mouth, warm, moist, sweet . . .

But she wasn’t the one. He knew it before she touched him, before he surfaced to see the dark, worried face bending over him. She smelled wrong, like rubbing alcohol instead of like dawn, fresh and full of possibilities.

“I’ll be back
,
”
she had promised.

But she did not come again.

“Where . . .” he croaked.

Is she?

“Ssh. Drink this.” A straw poked his lips.

He closed his mouth gratefully on the plastic, holding the water carefully in his mouth before letting it trickle down to soothe his throat. Only as the flat taste lingered on his tongue did he realize it was drugged.

Time stretched, passed, hours—days?—measured by the rasp of his breathing and the sound of footsteps and the coming and going of the silver light.

And the questions, always the questions, pursuing him into the dark.

“Who are you?”

“What do you want?”

“Where do you come from?”

He closed his mind, closed his mouth stubbornly on the answers, but in the dark between times, visions leaked and flooded his brain. A tumbled shore of sand and shale. Green hills cradling the water like a cup. A broken castle on the cliffs, its ancient towers glazed with light.

Danger.

His heart hammered. His head pounded with impending doom. The wave was coming. He had to save them. He had to save . . .

“Who?”

A man with eyes like rain, a girl with hair like straw, a
dog .
. .

Their images spun away, snatched by the rising and falling sea. He couldn’t save them. He could no longer save himself. His strength was gone, everything was gone, smashed, drowned, vanished beneath the waves.

He did not answer.

“Of course he doesn’t answer. I’d be surprised if he can even hear you.”

That voice. He recognized that voice. Fucking Axton. 

His lips drew back in a snarl, but he did not speak. Didn’t open his eyes. Let them think he was asleep or drugged or dead.

“It’s his shields.”

“It’s the drugs.”

 “—danger with concussion,” the woman was saying.

The doctor, he remembered. Marian? Miriam.

“Appropriate dosage for a human.”

“Well, he’s not human, is he?” snapped the first speaker.

He was listening now, but the words had no more meaning than the tolling of a buoy.

Not human
.

Not
human
?

“Tel me something I don’t know.”

“Well,” the doctor said slowly, “his toes are webbed.”

For an instant, he couldn’t breathe. Something flashed in his brain, stronger than recognition, more elusive than memory. And then the footsteps faded. The light behind his closed lids ebbed away.

He lay with the sound of the sea’s long retreat echoing in his head, his thoughts raucous and meaningless as the cries of seabirds over something that has died.

He wasn’t dead yet.

But he might as well be. He felt like a diver plunged unexpectedly into the water, unable to distinguish up from down, past from present, dreams from reality.

He needed answers. Help. A weapon. They’d taken his knife.

Something hard—a loose slat, a broken coil—poked his shoulder blades.

If they were going to lock him up, he thought with a sudden flash of clarity, they might at least have provided a comfortable mattress.

The lump at his back gave him a focus. He could fashion a tool from wood or wire. A shank. It took several tries, but eventually he managed to roll onto his side. Panting, he jammed his hand between the frame and the mattress and touched . . .

Not a slat. A knife. His knife, shaped to his palm.

Lara.
He felt her presence as keenly as the blade. Her touch, lingering on the handle. Her energy, vibrating through his fingertips. Her breath, in him. He saw her, her eyes large and gray beneath dark winged brows.

He clung to her image like hope, like the spar, fighting to keep his head above water. He had his weapon. Now all he needed was answers.

And a way out.

* * *

The whispers of her disgrace were up before she was.

Lara heard the stutter of conversation when she entered the vaulted dining hall the next morning, a sudden drop in noise level followed by a rustle like wind through corn. She stood with her breakfast tray at the end of the serving line while the younger students craned to get a look at her and the other proctors carefully avoided her eyes.

Her stomach sank.

The teachers took the first two meals of the day in the faculty dining room, leaving the proctors to monitor the students. A few proctors patrolled the tables or ate with favorites from their floors, but most grabbed this chance to sit together. Lara carried her tray to join them at the round tables at the end of the hall. One or two people collected their trays and left without a word.

Heat rushed to her cheeks.

It didn’t mean anything, she told herself. Breakfast service was nearly over. She was late, that was all.

She saw Gideon sitting with his girlfriend Ariel. The young Guardian looked heavy-eyed and grim, as if he hadn’t slept any better than she had.

She offered him a quick, sympathetic smile. “Hi, Gideon.”

He barely nodded in reply, his attention fixed on his plate.

Ariel glared at her and whispered something to the girl on her other side.

Lara’s smile faltered before she looked away.

She found two members of her cohort, David and Jacob, sitting together at an otherwise empty table. They were deep in a discussion about restoration glass, but as she approached, Jacob thrust a booted foot under the table, pushing out a chair for her. Gratefully, she sat. David speared a piece of pineapple from her plate, waving it around on the end of his fork as he argued about ways to duplicate the color effects of arsenic.

“Fluorspar doesn’t produce the same fire,” he insisted.

“But it’s more consistent,” Jacob said. “Not to mention legal.”

Buffered by their undemanding company, she began to relax. The buzz of conversation, the clatter of plates and glassware, mingled with the swirl of steam from the serving line, rising in the vaulted, sunlit room. This was her reality. This was her life. Last night was like a wonderful, terrible, moonlit dream.

Memory unfurled inside her like a bird beating to get out.

The long lines of Justin’s body on the cellar steps. His mouth, salty and warm. The surge of power and freedom and lust she’d felt when she was with him. In him.

Taking a deep breath, she reached for her orange juice.

She’d done everything she could to help Justin. Maybe it would be enough.

A shadow fell over her fruit plate.

“Leave him alone.” Ariel stood flanked by her friend beside their table, her pretty face contorted. “Haven’t you done enough already?”

Lara lowered her juice glass. “Excuse me?”

“I can’t believe you have the guts to even speak to him after what you did.”

Speak to
. . . Gideon, Lara realized. Ariel was talking about Gideon.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You got him in trouble with Zayin because you failed as Seeker.”

Lara glanced at Gideon, already walking with his tray toward the bus line, his back stiff, his face turned away. “Is that what he told you?”

“He didn’t have to. All the lower cohorts are saying you didn’t come back with a new student last night.”

Ariel’s friend nodded. David hunched his shoulders, apparently fascinated by the congealing eggs on his plate.

“They’re kids.” Lara kept her voice even with effort. “They don’t know what they’re talking about. And neither do you.”

“Really?” Ariel set her hands on her hips. “Then why did Master Zayin pull Gideon off lampwork?”

Lampwork—crafting beads with a torch from colored glass rods—was a coveted apprenticeship. The beads were imbued with power as well as color, used not only for jewelry but for charms.

Lara bit her lip. If Gideon had been dismissed from spell work, no wonder he was upset. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s probably only temporary.”

“You two better watch out,” Ariel said to David and Jacob. “If Zayin finds out you’re hanging around with her, you could be reassigned, too.”

Jacob pushed back his chair. “That’s crap. Zayin’s not going to stop us from taming fire because your boyfriend screwed up.”

Ariel’s eyes glittered with moisture. “He didn’t. Take it back.”

“What is this, high school?”

“Gideon did his job,” Lara said quickly. “I’m the one responsible for . . . for the mission.”

An uncomfortable pause.

“That’s all right then,” David said. “I mean, you work for the headmaster.”

“Not anymore,” Ariel said with satisfaction.

Lara’s throat tightened.

“Lara? What’s she talking about?” Jacob asked.

“I hear your friend is in really deep shit.” The girl with Ariel tittered. “Literally.”

“She’s working in the bird house,” Ariel said with gleeful vindictiveness. “With Crazy Moon and the other cuckoos.”

“Oh, hey.” David’s good-natured face creased in sympathy. “That sucks.”

Lara swallowed. “It’s only temporary,” she said again.

And heard Simon saying,
“Until I can trust your judgment,
you cannot work for me
.”

Her hands shredded her napkin in her lap. He would forgive her, eventually. Everything could go back to normal. If only she’d be quiet, if only she’d be good . . .

“From now on, you cannot see him, cannot speak to
him,
cannot visit him, is that clear?”

She stared down at the bright pattern of fruit on her plate, all appetite gone.

* * *

Dust motes danced in the diffused brightness of the raptor enclosure. Lara’s rake rattled over the gravel subfloor, turning up broken bones and hardened pellets, the remains of small dead rodents, digested and undigested.

The big bird perched in the corner turned its wicked head, surveying her with a bright, suspicious eye. Lara froze like a rabbit. Moon
said
the bird wouldn’t attack. But Moon was crazy. Everyone knew that.

As if summoned by the thought, the mews keeper appeared in the door of the cage. She was tall , like most of their kind, and striking, like all of them. But her wavy hippie hair was tied back with a leather jess, her strong, angular body swallowed by a shapeless brown tunic. Her blue eyes were cloudy and vague.

“When you’ve finished sweeping, you can scrub out his bath.” Moon flapped her hand at the metal pan weighted by an old tire in the middle of the cage.

Lara eyed the scummy water without enthusiasm.

Self-knowledge and obedience, she reminded herself.

She didn’t know what Simon expected her to learn in this dirty, shadowed hole. But she knew what she had to do.

“Okay.”

The keeper padded across the enclosure, her slippered feet silent on the newly raked floor. “There’s my lovely boy, then,” she crooned to the bird. “You’re one of Simon’s girls, aren’t you?”

It took Lara a moment to realize Moon was speaking to her.

She flushed. “I work for him, if that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t care if you dance for him naked,” the keeper said.

“But he found you.”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. I’m good with faces,” Moon said with satisfaction. “Better with birds, but still, I remember. You came in here with your class, a dozen years ago.”

Lara’s heart beat faster at the memory. Bria had made her stay behind in the shadowed mews when the rest of their cohort had escaped to sunlight and safety. Her friend had been fascinated by the birds, their daggered feet, their cruel, curved beaks, their caged grace.

She shrugged to hide her discomfort. “Everyone comes once. It’s part of the life science unit.”

“But I remember you,” Moon said. “You were friends with that little blond girl. The flyer.”

Lara’s mouth jarred open. No one talked about the flyers.

Ever. After Bria ran away, it was as if the other girl had never been. Lara had grieved for her friend in silence and alone. “She was my roommate.”

Moon cocked her head. “Never came back.”

“No,” Lara whispered.

“I meant you.”

“Oh.” Lara fought an absurd urge to apologize. “No, I . . .”

“Most of them don’t,” Moon said frankly. “Unless they want to use the birds in the flight cages to practice spirit casting.”